Wearbands review for ShipMonk | Order Fulfillment

Oct. 4, 2021

I have been running businesses for 30+ years, and I can say, without a doubt, that no single business I have ever worked with has damaged the reputation of my company more than ShipMonk. Make no mistake, ShipMonk is a sales company, and cares very little for their customers once they have signed you up. I strongly urge you to go back through Shopify’s reviews from 2020 and early 2021. Recently, the reviews are all “miraculously” five-stars, and do not sound authentic….sound a bit more like advertisements than reviews. Who knows, maybe these vendors have had experiences with a ShipMonk from an alternate universe. And i would not buy the "COVID, COVID, COVID, we have addressed those issues" line. A Zebra does not change its stripes. Here are my experiences…judge for yourself and beware before getting in bed with these guys. Also check out their reviews on Google. All of my experiences outlined below are well-documented, and if you check out other reviews, you will see similarly bad experiences, though maybe not in as much detail! ShipMonk’s systems are poorly designed, their internal communications are terrible, their email system is very inefficient and frustrating to use, and their customer service is atrocious, both in terms of response time, getting accurate information and maybe most importantly, attitude. It is extremely slow…be prepared to wait sometimes days for a response, which is often unhelpful or inaccurate, and then wait again for their response to your response, etc., etc. Many of their customer service reps are poorly trained, often not knowing answers to basic questions or, worse, delivering incorrect information, and it is almost as if they have been trained to take any opportunity to blame the customer for any issues that arise. All of this adds up to a terrible customer experience, a lot of frustration and stress, and often requires hours each week to sort out their mess, all the while fielding phone calls from unhappy customers due to shipping errors and delayed shipments. A fulfillment center should be taking fulfillment issues off your desk, so you can focus on your business. With ShipMonk, hours a week are spent double checking their work or trying to get them to do what they are supposed to do on time and without being asked. I was with ShipMonk for about a year and a half. They initially flat out misrepresented their capabilities to me. I see from WAMA Underwear’s review, that ShipMonk is still habitually misrepresenting their services in order to sign up new clients. Like WAMA’s, their misrepresentation to us was not discovered, of course, until all of our inventory had arrived at their warehouse. They made very little effort, or displayed any urgency, to rectify the situation, and made no offer to reduce their cost of service, which went up substantially due to their misrepresentation of what they could and could not do, and at what price. All the while, their auto-payment systems keeps pulling funds from your account, while getting any kind of solution drags on and on. I gave them multiple opportunities, and tried to work with them, to make things right, but they were clearly not interested and could not be bothered. It seems their sole focus is signing up new clients, and not providing good service with a good attitude to the clients they have signed up. They have almost an adversarial relationship with their customers, as if you are just a necessary evil to generate revenue and grow. We make and sell an exercise systems. ShipMonk sent our customers, among other things, a dress, a purse, a sweatshirt and tap shoes…yes, tap shoes. They always send you a form apology email, letting you know how they are working to see that this does not happen again…until it happens again. Mispicks, missing items and wrong sizes were also a common problem. Their time estimates for special projects are not to be taken seriously. They almost never meet their own estimate, and instead, deliver excuse after excuse. You cannot rely on their status updates to communicate with your customers, because you have no idea if they will do what they said they will do when they said they will do it, leading to upset customers who rightfully blame you. The costs they charged us for special projects were grossly over-charged, and only after I discovered them and brought it to their attention, did they acknowledge as much. To this day, it is not clear to me whether we were ever refunded the overcharges, and we spent months, yes months, just trying to establish a fair charge for the work (we decided to leave before that was resolved). They provide very little transparency in regards to their costs and pricing…you have to dig into their reporting for the information. Though they have many shipping options, they are rarely the most cost effective. Since leaving, we have found significantly cheaper and more cost-effective rates, faster shipping and improved reliability. The attractive shipping options they quote are before carrier surcharges, which can be as much as 50-80% of the shipping cost itself. They partnered with several carriers during our time with them, who were flat out incompetent, lost packages, did not provide adequate tracking, etc. And ShipMonk will not allow you to follow up on your own to get tracking updates from carriers directly, so you must suffer through waiting for ShipMonk to follow up, which takes up valuable time and rarely delivers any actionable information. ShipMonk does not seem to understand, or more likely does not really care, that they are representing you, their customer, in the marketplace. When they screw up, or take days to get back to you, or ship tap shoes to your customers, the customer does not blame ShipMonk…they only know that you screwed up their order. Such is life with ShipMonk. I hope you find this information valuable. I thought it was important to share my experience in detail with you, to expose what I believe to be a very poorly run and untrustworthy company in the fulfillment space. There are plenty of fulfillment companies in the marketplace, and if you do your homework, you can likely find ones who pride themselves on customer service, and doing their job competently as an integral part of your business. And if something does go wrong, will give it and you the attention you deserve. In our experience, ShipMonk is not one of those companies. They are a sales company trying to grow as fast as they can, and you, as their customer, are of little consequence.